The public fight between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump gave both of their preferred posting venues a traffic bump, according to Sensor Tower data reported by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch. X moved to No. 23 in the overall US App Store ranking on June 5, after averaging No. 68 over the previous 30 days and No. 58 over the past six months.
Truth Social also saw a surge as Trump used the service to post about Musk. Sensor Tower's panel indicated that US mobile app active users for Truth Social rose by more than 400 percent compared with the prior seven days, TechCrunch reported.
The scale difference is the useful part. Sensor Tower told TechCrunch that X still has about 100 times as many US mobile app users as Truth Social. A large percentage jump on Truth Social, in other words, does not make it a peer of X. It means Trump's audience opened the app more often while he was fighting with Musk in public.
A social network in name, a Trump feed in practice
John Gruber of Daring Fireball argued that Truth Social is better understood as Trump's personal publishing outlet than as a functioning competitor to X, Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon. His point is not that the service lacks users. It is that the service's news value appears to come almost entirely from one account.
Gruber noted that Trump was once Twitter's most famous user before being removed from major social platforms after the 2020 election fight, and that Trump later launched Truth Social as an apparent Twitter-like network. Musk, meanwhile, paid $44 billion for Twitter, renamed it X and has described ambitions for an everything app.
On paper, that sets up a direct rivalry: Trump owns a network, Musk owns the larger one, and the two men were political allies until the current rupture. In practice, Gruber wrote, Trump has not pushed his own administration and allies to make Truth Social their main venue or to abandon X.
Gruber pointed to the US Justice Department as an example. Its official X account posts several times a day, he wrote, while the department does not have a Truth Social account. He also cited Vice President JD Vance's activity: roughly a dozen Truth Social posts in the past month, compared with five posts on X in a single day.
That usage pattern supports Gruber's reading of the service: Truth Social functions less like a broad social network and more like a blog with a built-in comment section. Users gather around Trump's posts, while reporters and TV producers treat those posts as statements from the president.
The Trump-Musk feud gave Truth Social a measurable burst of attention. Sensor Tower's numbers also show the limit of that attention. X remains much larger, and the broader political class around Trump still appears to post where the audience is.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
